So long and thanks for all the fish

18122006

Ladies and gentleman,

Just a brief pause in your busy lives to say goodbye to the baiji, a white Yangtze river dolphin. Another victim – extinct at the hands of human kind. Stuck it out for 20 million years but I guess we humans were just too good on the day. See you later old mate.

The Yangtze, Asia’s longest waterway and thought to be akin to the Amazon long ago in its biological richness, now has a dominant species: the 400 million (and counting) people busily plying its waters and industrializing its banks.

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I saw a well informed estimate of about 27 species being lost per day. (based on 1,000 species per million lost per year, and a conservative estimate of 10 million species) I think I read somewhere as well that we may see the loss of something like 50% of all species by the end of the century — unless of course we take some serious actions. What a shame.

You’re right. It is truly a catastrophe. The web of life is surely a delicate one. You start taking too many foundation stones out of the pyramid and pretty soon the pyramid starts to become quite unstable. An emergency of massive proportions.